The present invention generally relates to rollover sensors and, more particularly, to low-cost vehicle rollover sensors for sensing a rollover or pitchover condition of a vehicle.
Future generation automotive vehicles may increasingly employ safety-related devices that deploy in the event that the vehicle rolls over to provide added protection to the occupants of the vehicle. For example, upon detecting a vehicle rollover condition, a pop-up roll bar can be deployed such that, when activated, the roll bar further extends vertically outward to increase the height of support provided by the roll bar. Other controllable features may include actuating deployment of one or more air bags, such as front or side deployment air bags, or actuating a pretensioner to pretension a restraining device, such as a seat belt or safety harness, to prevent occupants of the vehicle from ejecting from the vehicle or colliding with the roof of the vehicle.
In the past, basic rollover sensors have been employed in automotive vehicles to measure the angular position of the vehicle from which a rollover condition can be determined. The basic rollover sensors have included the use of a pendulum normally hanging vertically downward due to the earth's gravitational force. Many basic automotive sensing devices are employed simply to monitor the angular position of the vehicle relative to a level ground horizontal position. As a consequence, the basic automotive vehicle rollover sensors have generally been susceptible to error when the vehicle travels around a turn or becomes airborne, in which case the earth's gravitational force, which the sensor relies on, may be overcome by other forces.
More recently, sophisticated rollover sensing approaches have been considered. One such approach considered requires the use of six sensors including three accelerometers and three angular rate sensors, also referred to as gyros, all of which are employed together for use in an inertial navigation system which tracks position and attitude of the vehicle. The three accelerometers generally provide lateral, longitudinal, and vertical acceleration measurements of the vehicle, while the three gyros measure pitch rate, roll rate, and yaw rate. However, the more sophisticated rollover sensing approaches generally require a large number of high-precision and expensive sensors. In addition, known sophisticated systems are susceptible to cumulative drift errors, and therefore must be reset occasionally.
It is, therefore, one object of the present invention to provide for vehicle rollover and pitchover sensing that requires minimal sensed measurement parameters and is relatively immune to errors generally found in conventional automotive-grade sensors. It is another object of the present invention to provide for vehicle rollover sensing for an automotive vehicle that may predict a future rollover condition in advance to allow time to deploy occupant protection measures. It is a further object of the present invention to provide for reliable vehicle rollover sensing in a low-cost sensing module.